Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to programmers: Stop building the house. Start designing it.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to programmers: Stop building the house. Start designing it. The former Google CEO said AI coding tools have beaten him at writing code even at his best. Alexander Tamargo/Getty Images for America Business Forum The former Google CEO said AI has beaten him at the thing he was once best at.Eric Schmidt, now 71, told Blackstone's "Inside Blackstone" podcast that he was among the top programmers of his generation, but today's AI coding tools are writing the code he couldn't."I was a very, very good programmer when I was 22, right? I was one of the best, according to myself. My field is over, right?" Schmidt told podcast host Christine Anderson. "I look at the code it writes now. I can't write that code. I couldn't when I was 22, right? So, I got beaten, right? Hard."Still, Schmidt tells young people to learn to code so they can give the most accurate orders to AI tools and be the brains of the design."I had to build the house," Schmidt said in an analogy. "Now I can architect the house using the equivalent of Claude Code or OpenAI Codex or future products from Google, which they're working on, all of which allow me to say what I want and the code gets written.""The next generation of people like me will be the architects, and they'll be very, very smart and they know how to say, 'this is what I want,'" Schmidt added.The shift is already underway inside AI companies. At Daytona, a 30-person AI startup, CEO Ivan Burazin previously told Business Insider that each of the 16 engineers manages an average of five AI agents, and no one there writes code anymore.Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao also said on the "Invest Like the Best" podcast that AI now handles much of the execution layer of knowledge work, including producing some of the company's financial statements, freeing up humans for oversight and strategy."90 plus percent of our code is actually written by Claude Code," Rao said. "Everyone kind of becomes a manager." Read next Katherine Li is a reporter on Business Insider's West Coast business news team. She covers career, the future of work, and how AI is changing hiring practices and workplace trends.Previously, she was a newsroom fellow who wrote international breaking news and produced newsletters for Semafor. Before that, she wrote about climate policies for The Lever, covered the AAPI community for the SF Chronicle as a freelancer, and wrote about the 2019 Hong Kong protests as an intern for The New York Times.She is an alumna of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and a graduate of the international journalism program at Hong Kong Baptist University with minors in French and English literature. Email Katherine at katherineli@insider.com and follow her on Bluesky @katherineli.bsky.social. Careers Google automation More